Truth, but Not the Whole Truth

The Wikileaks video of a lethal incident in Baghdad in July, 2007, reminds me of footage I once saw of Brazilian hunters in a helicopter chasing Indians as they fled across the bush and mowing them down for sport. And it left me with the same sickened feeling—at the cold-blooded merriment of the shooters, their safe and dehumanizing distance from their targets, the exposed helplessness of the Iraqis being shot up in the sunwashed street. Shame, disgust, outrage: these are the normal, the right, the only human feelings one can have on seeing such a scene. And they are the feelings the producers of this short video, originally taken by a camera in one of the Apaches and leaked by someone in the military, want to evoke.

There is an account of the same incident by David Finkel, the Washington Post reporter who spent fifteen months with the battalion involved, the 2-16. It appears in Chapter 5 of Finkel’s powerful book about the surge, “The Good Soldiers.” It takes about as long to read those twenty-two pages as it does to watch the seventeen-minute video (which Finkel must have seen long before it was leaked), but you learn much more from the book—about the actions of the militiamen that day and previous days, about the thoughts and feelings of some of the American ground troops, about the difference between being on the streets and several thousand feet up at the controls of an Apache, about the ambiguous role of the Iraqi police. Finkel gives what he calls “four versions of the war” on that single day. The soldiers are callous, as you would expect young men caught up in a particularly ugly and confusing kind of war to be. Callous and angry—and also, in other moments, hopeful, generous, capable of friendliness toward Iraqis. Literature—and Finkel’s book deserves the name—excels at this kind of breadth and depth of vision.

Photography and video generally do not, especially when there’s no human being behind the lens. By their nature images strip events of context: their powerful impact in part depends on narrowness, immediacy, and purity of form. And there’s a great deal that this video leaves out. It doesn’t tell you about the circumstances of the attack, how a few days earlier this neighborhood in eastern Baghdad had exploded in combat between American soldiers and Sadrist militiamen detonating hidden bombs and staging ambushes. It doesn’t tell you about the fighting going on near the street where a group of men, some of them armed, come into the Apaches’ view. It doesn’t tell you that the Apaches are providing support for infantrymen of the 2-16, in armored vehicles, who have been taking fire.

These pieces of missing information are not just inherent limitations in video. The producers themselves have chosen not to provide them. There appears to be a purpose to the omissions, which is underlined by the Orwell quote at the start, the prefatory explanation, the quotes and dedication at the end, even the way the helicopter crew’s cruel remarks are edited in a few places for effect. Although the producers identify the camera of the Reuters journalist who, along with his assistant, will be killed by Apache cannon fire, they don’t point to the AK-47 or the RPG launcher carried by other men with whom the journalists are walking in a group. Stripped of much context and weighted with commentary, this video is both an important document of the war, courageously leaked after the military had steadily refused to release it, and, in its way, a propaganda film. (Wikileaks also released an unadorned, unedited, thirty-eight-minute version on a Web site called Collateral Murder.)

Does it reveal a war crime? I don’t think so. This isn’t Abu Ghraib, or the rape atrocity in the Triangle of Death, or the Haditha massacre. The Apache crews make a series of bad judgments—some of them understandable, like mistaking the photographer’s long lens as it pokes around the corner of a building for an RPG; others much less defensible, like firing repeatedly at a van that has stopped to pick up a wounded man—but they aren’t shooting indiscriminately like in a free-fire zone. The video is important because it shows the kind of tragedy that is absolutely inevitable in wars likes the ones America has been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but especially in urban Baghdad: where a journalist and a militiaman can appear indistinguishable, where a gunner surrounded by noise and heat high in the sky will fail or choose not to look for complicating details in the scene far below, and where a van taking away a wounded man might be a legitimate target if it were a military vehicle in a conventional war. Those who say that incidents like this have been common in Iraq and Afghanistan are not wrong. The military’s claim that the soldiers followed their rules of engagement is probably not wrong either (though the attempted cover-up invites suspicion). Anyone who sends young troops into war should expect them to kill innocent people by mistake, and to crack jokes about the people they’ve killed. This doesn’t make them war criminals, or even moral monsters. Nor is it the whole truth about them, or about the war. But it’s a truth, and it should be seen.